Was Alekhine a
Nazi?

Edward Winter

(1989, with updates)

In March 1941 a series of articles under the name of Alexander
Alekhine appeared in Pariser Zeitung, a newspaper
published in the French capital by the occupying German forces.
Entitled ‘Aryan and Jewish Chess’, the articles claimed that Jews
had had a destructive effect on the development of the game. Three
brief extracts will give the flavour:

‘Do the Jews, as a race, have a gift for chess? After 30
years’ chess experience I would like to answer this question in
the following manner: yes, the Jews have an exceptional talent
for exploiting chess, chess ideas and the practical
possibilities that arise. But there has not been up to now a Jew
who was a real chess artist.’

‘Just as with Nimzowitsch and his System, so was Réti
given a warm welcome by the majority of Anglo-Jewish
pseudo-intellectuals for his book Die neuen Ideen im Schach.
... And this cheap bluff, this shameless self-publicity, was
swallowed without resistance by a chess world, poisoned by
Jewish journalists, which echoed the jubilant cries of Jews and
their friends; “Long live Réti, and long live hypermodern
neoromantic chess”.’

‘Again in the 1937 return match with Euwe the collective chess
Jewry was aroused. Most of the Jewish masters mentioned in this
review attended as press reporters, trainer and seconds for
Euwe. At the beginning of the second match I could no longer let
myself be deceived: that is, I had to fight not Euwe, but the
combined chess Jewry, and in the event my decisive victory
(10:4) was a triumph against the Jewish conspiracy.’

Much of the material was subsequently reprinted, though with
considerable textual variants, in Deutsche Zeitung in den
Niederlanden and Deutsche Schachzeitung. The
magazine CHESS printed extensive English translations (of
the Deutsche Schachzeitung version), as did Horowitz and
Rothenberg’s 1963 book The Personality of Chess. However,
it was not until 1986 that a complete English version of the
original Pariser Zeitung articles became available (Alekhine
Nazi Articles, an excellent privately printed booklet edited
by Kenneth Whyld). In recent years there have also been two
reproductions of the original German, by Wolfgang Kubel (1973) and
Herbert Griesshammer (1983).

An extract from Deutsche
Zeitung in den Niederlanden

Condemnation of the articles came from many notable sources. The
November 1945 CHESS (page 28) quoted from De Waarheid
a denunciation of Alekhine by G.C.A. Oskam: ‘His libellous
articles have filled me with sorrow. They were written by a
miserable collaborator, by a mean profiteer; they breathe lies and
fraud, the necessary elements of racial hatred; they are dictated
by the qualities present in the person of a double traitor ...’
The same magazine published an anti-Alekhine letter from Ossip
Bernstein which was not without over-the-fence gossip: ‘I refrain
from giving further disgusting details about his behaviour. It
could be added that he adopted the Nazi salute “Heil Hitler”
with outstretched arm.’

Alekhine’s first disavowal of the articles appears to date from
just after the liberation of Paris (and not from just after the
end of the War, as sometimes alleged even today). The December
1944 BCM (pages 274-275) and the January 1945 CHESS
(page 53) both reported Alekhine’s statement in a published
interview (News Review, 23 November 1944 was the source
according to CHESS) that while in France ‘he had to write
two chess articles for the Pariser Zeitung before the
Germans granted him his exit visa ... Articles which Alekhine
claims were purely scientific were rewritten by the Germans,
published and made to treat chess from a racial viewpoint.’

After his invitation to the London, 1946 tournament was withdrawn
because of his war record, Alekhine wrote a long open letter to
the organizer, W. Hatton-Ward, which was widely published at the
time. With regard to the articles, he stated:

‘Among the heap of monstrosities published by the Pariser
Zeitung appeared insults against the members of the
Committee which organized the 1937 match: and the Dutch Chess
Federation even lodged a protest on this matter with Post. At
that time I was absolutely powerless to do the one thing which
would have clarified the situation, to declare that the articles
had not been written by me ... For three years, until Paris was
liberated, I had to keep silent. But from the first opportunity
I tried in interviews to show up the facts in their true light.
Of the articles which appeared in 1941 during my stay in
Portugal and which I learnt about in the Deutsche
Schachzeitung, nothing was actually written by me. I had
submitted material dealing with the necessary reconstruction of
the FIDE (the International Chess Federation) and a critique,
written well before 1938, of the theories of Lasker and
Steinitz. I was surprised when I received letters from Messrs
Helms and Sturgis at the reaction which these articles – purely
technical – had provoked in America and I replied to Mr Helms
accordingly. Only when I knew what incomparably stupid
lucubrations had been created in a spirit imbued with Nazi ideas
did I realize what it was all about. But I was then a prisoner
of the Nazis and our only hope of preservation was to keep
silent. Those years ruined my health and my nerves and I am even
surprised that I can still play chess.’

(The above is the CHESS translation. In the BCM
Helms came out as ‘Helsus’ and ‘1939’ was given rather than 1938.)

Alekhine wrote a further denial on page xx of his last book, the
posthumous !Legado!:

‘Once more I insist on repeating that which I have published on
several occasions: that is, that the articles which were stupid
and untrue from a chess point of view and which were printed
signed with my name in a Paris newspaper in 1941 are a
falsification. It is not the first time that unscrupulous
newspapers have abused my name in order to publish inanities of
that kind but in the present case what was published in Pariser
Zeitung is what has caused me the most grief, not only
because of its content but also precisely because it is
impossible for me to rectify it ... Colleagues know my
sentiments and they know perfectly well how great is the esteem
in which I hold their art and that I have too elevated a concept
of chess to become entangled in the absurd statements poured out
by the above-mentioned Parisian newspaper.’

Thus Alekhine’s line of defence was not consistent. Sometimes he
claimed to have written nothing, but on other occasions said that
the anti-Jewish slant had been added by others. The latter
possibility is unlikely; once the anti-Jewish slant is taken away
there is hardly anything left.

Alexander Alekhine

Two widely-read reference books, Golombek’s The Encyclopedia
of Chess (London, 1977) and Hooper and Whyld’s The
Oxford Companion to Chess (Oxford, 1984), state that upon
the death of Alekhine’s widow in 1956 the articles were found in
Alekhine’s own handwriting. In both cases the authors subsequently
gave their source for this information: Brian Reilly, then the
Editor of the BCM, had told them in 1956 that he had just
seen the articles. However, this is denied by Reilly, whose
eagerly-awaited biography of Alekhine will doubtless provide his
account of the matter. [Brian Reilly died in 1991, and his work on
Alekhine has not been published.] Another alleged sighting of the
articles also has a curious twist. In the May 1986 Europe
Echecs (pages 300-301) Jacques Le Monnier reported that
before her death Grace Alekhine had passed a number of her late
husband’s notebooks to a friend (unnamed). In 1958 Le Monnier was
given access to the material and found, word for word and in
Alekhine’s own handwriting, the text of the first anti-Semitic
article, which had appeared in Pariser Zeitung of 18 March
1941. The word ‘Jew’ was almost invariably underlined, Le Monnier
reported. This testimony seems watertight until one compares it
with what Le Monnier wrote about the articles on page 24 of his
1973 book 75 parties d’Alekhine: ‘Alekhine stated several
times that “not a word had been written by him”. It will never be
known whether Alekhine was behind these articles or whether they
were “manipulated” by the editor of the Pariser Zeitung, a
Czech player well known at the time in Parisian chess circles.’
These are, to say the least, surprising words from someone who, a
dozen or so years later, was to declare that he himself had seen
one anti-Semitic article in Alekhine’s own handwriting. (In
passing it may also be wondered why Alekhine and his wife
refrained from destroying such incriminating material as may have
been in their possession after the fall of the Third Reich.)

Such inconsistencies will be welcomed by defenders of Alekhine,
many of whom have suggested that, being forced, for his own and
his wife’s safety, to write anti-Semitic material, the then world
champion deliberately made it ridiculous and inaccurate. The
original Pariser Zeitung publication contained many
elementary misspellings of proper names (‘Marschall’, ‘Andersen’,
‘Pilsburry’, etc. ). There is a reference to the match between La
Bourdonnais and ‘Macdonald’ (instead of McDonnell) and to a
‘Polish Jew’ named ‘Kienezitzky’. (Kieseritzky is meant, although
he was apparently neither Polish nor Jewish.) Some mistakes were
corrected in the Deutsche Schachzeitung reprint, as were
factual errors like the suggestion in Pariser Zeitung that
Schlechter was a Jew. But the theory that Alekhine tried to signal
his insincerity is mere guesswork which is not even supported by
any claim to that effect from Alekhine himself. The wrong
spellings might just as easily be put down to a Pariser
Zeitung typesetter’s difficulty in reading Alekhine’s
idiosyncratic handwriting.

Fresh documentation has recently come to light which considerably
strengthens the case against Alekhine. Pablo Morán has
discovered two Madrid publications dated 3 September 1941 which
contain interviews given by Alekhine just before his departure for
the Munich, 1941 tournament. El Alcázar reported:

‘He [Alekhine] added that in the German magazine Deutsche
Schachzeitung and the German daily Pariser Zeitung,
currently published in Paris, he had been the first to deal with
chess from the racial point of view. In these articles, he said,
he wrote that Aryan chess was aggressive chess, that he
considered defence solely to be the consequence of earlier
error, and that, on the other hand, the Semitic concept admitted
the idea of pure defence, believing it legitimate to win this
way.’

Alekhine told Valentín González of Informaciones
about his intention to give lectures ‘about the evolution of chess
thought in recent times and the reasons for this evolution. There
would also be a study of the Aryan and Jewish kinds of chess.’
Moreover, Alekhine was quoted as saying that he was not in favour
in the United States and England ‘as a result of some articles I
wrote in the German press and some games I played in Paris during
the last winter – against 40 opponents – for the German Army and
Winter Relief.’ When asked which players he most admired
Alekhine’s published reply was: ‘... I must stress the greatest
glory of Capablanca, which was to eliminate the Jew Lasker from
the world chess throne.’

The Nazi articles affair is one of chess history’s most notorious
scandals and intriguing mysteries. Although, as things stand, it
is difficult to construct much of a defence for Alekhine, only the
discovery of the articles in his own handwriting will settle the
matter beyond all doubt.

The above article first appeared on pages 68-70 of the 2/1989 New
in Chess. On page 6 of the 4/1989 issue Jacques Le Monnier
made a brief reply. It consisted of a fuller extract from the Europe
Echecs article in which he had said that he had seen an
article in Alekhine’s own handwriting, as well as the following
remark:

‘I would not change a word. Alekhine’s notebooks are private
documents and French law is categorical in this respect. They
will enter in the public domain 60 years after the author’s
death, i.e. in 2006. After this date historians and researchers
may consult them, provided that Alekhine’s heirs and the owners
of the notebooks agree.’

In C.N. 1920 we quoted this and commented: ‘It is a pity that Mr
Le Monnier did not answer our straightforward point: if in 1958 he
saw an article in Alekhine’s own hand, why, some 15 years later,
did he write that ‘it will never be known whether Alekhine was
behind these articles …’?

C.N.s 3605, 3606 and 3617 reverted to the Alekhine affair, and
the third of these items mentioned that French copyright law
changed in the 1990s, with the result that the notebooks would not
enter the public domain until 1 January 2017.

Complete English translations of Alekhine’s articles in El
Alcázar and Informaciones were given in C.N.
1455 and are available as a separate feature
article.

As reported in C.N. 1041, a letter from Ossip Bernstein dated 5
October 1945 and published in the November 1945 CHESS
(pages 28-29) condemned Alekhine:

‘My profound attachment to chess restrains me from telling all
I think of Alekhine, since the fall of France. In May 1940, I
played against him in Paris (a so-called “consultation” game)
and won. I could not have guessed that he would behave
afterwards as he did. I shall never play against him again and I
do not even wish to see him. I refused to meet him at Barcelona,
when he visited that city to give chess exhibitions.

I think that the above makes my conception of “collaboration”
clear.

The chess world is aware of the tragic end of the grand Polish
chessmaster and composer Dawid Przepiórka, who was
condemned to death for having entered a café where chess
was played; he was forbidden to do that, because he was a Jew.
But it is not generally known that Alekhine, though on close
terms with the Nazi Governor of Poland, Dr Frank, with whom he
was photographed for Nazi periodicals published at the time,
refused to intervene to secure Przepiórka’s release. This
fact of his non-intervention was told me by Sämisch when he
came to Barcelona at the end of 1943. I could also mention
articles published by Alekhine after 1940 and the chess
exhibitions he gave to entertain the Nazi Forces. I refrain from
giving further disgusting details about his behaviour. It could
be added that he adopted the Nazi salute “Heil Hitler”
with outstretched arm.

I am fully aware of what my statements mean, but I consider it
my moral duty and I leave it to you to make conclusions.’

Alekhine’s reply was given on page 76 of the January 1946 issue:

‘Dr Alekhine informs us that the attacks quoted in CHESS
of Dr Oskam, who was always his friend, were particularly
painful to him.

“As for Dr Bernstein’s ‘information’, I can only state that
my friend D. Przepiórka was murdered before the end of
1939 (I heard the narrative of his [sic] from an
eye-witness) and it is known that I played in Germany and
Poland only from the end of 1941. What connection could I have
with this tragical event??

I may add that the game Dr Bernstein gives was played at my
home and had an absolutely private character – but of course
this has no importance at all.”

Dr Alekhine goes on to say that he has been very sick this year
but had to go on playing, or starve. He has had a rest at
Tenerife and is feeling much better, but ill-health and worry
have sapped his playing ability.’

Regarding Przepiórka, it is believed that he was killed in
April 1940 (see C.N. 6618).

(7181)

The accusation that Alekhine did not intervene on behalf of Dawid
Przepiórka was rebutted in a footnote to Alekhine’s
obituary on page 87 of the June 1946 Revue suisse
d’échecs: